Delivery Robots Have Found A Home In Office Parks

Starship's delivery robots collect food or drinks from a business park's canteen before bringing it to the front door of a particular building.GIF via Starship Technologies

Srivathsan Canchi is one of “thousands” of office workers at the sprawling headquarters of technology firm Intuit who has been ordering his coffee from a robot.

There’s no need for the product manager to stand in line anymore, all the more useful since he injured his foot.

Instead he opens the Starship Technologies app on his phone, and orders his caffeinated drink. Around 15 minutes later, a dog-sized robot on wheels rolls around the corner to meet Canchi at the front of his building.

The perk for office workers is turning into a new business model for Starship Technologies. The Estonian company, which recently moved its headquarters to San Francisco, has been testing 10 of its robots on Intuit’s campus for “several months” and is preparing to deploy 1,000 robots this year, says Janus Friis, co-CEO of Starship. "We are ready to scale to many campuses.”

To date the company has built around 100 automated robots, all painted white and black and fitted with a raised, red flag to alert passers by.

Friis says Starship has also spent the last three-and-a-half years developing its autonomous driving technology, which is why it can now ramp up manufacturing to produce “thousands of robots… within a year.”

Starship has been testing its robots on the streets of London, San Francisco and Arkansas, but running them on an enclosed space like a corporate or academic campus takes away some of the legal complications that come with releasing automated vehicles onto sidewalks.

Corporate customers like Intuit pay a subscription to run the robots on its property and for the occasional help of human beings. Starship has a control centre in Washington D.C. with human operators that sometimes step in to help the robots when they come up against an obstacle - say a bag of trash or a large tree branch on the sidewalk.

Around 95% of the robots’ movement is fully automated, according to Starship’s co-founder Ahti Heinla, who in a previous life co-founded Skype.

“We have never aimed to have these robots be 100% autonomous because we believe there are just going to be so many long-tail situations that are difficult to solve,” he added.

Heinla said his robots had delivered to “thousands” of customers on Intuit’s campus, and that the company was planning to deliver non-food items like office supplies and packages.

An Intuit employee picking up their delivery from a Starship RobotPhoto via Starship Technologies

Founded in 2014 and with approximately 30 employees, according to Pitchbook, the company has raised $17.2 million from investors including carmaker Daimler, Shasta Ventures and Russian robotics firm, Grishin Robotics.

“We have been doing a lot of small scale experiments but the corporate campus service is something we are ready to scale right now,” says Friis.

“We have several potential customers in the pipeline,” he adds. “It’s the first service in them world where people can download an app, order groceries or food and have it delivered by a robot.”

I cover developments in AI, robotics, chatbots, digital assistants and emerging tech in Europe. I've spent close to a decade profiling the hackers and dreamers who are bringing the most cutting-edge technology into our lives, for better or worse. I'm the author of "We Are ...